Russian literature

by kniaz Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

WAR AND PEACE

In the year 1862 Tolstóy married the young daughter of a Moscow doctor, Bers; and, staying nearly without interruption on his Túla estate, he gave his time, for the next fifteen or sixteen years, to his great work, War and Peace, and next to Anna Karénina. His first intention was to write (probably utilising some family traditions and documents) a great historical novel, The Decembrists (see Chapter I.), and he finished in 1863 the first chapters of this novel (Vol. III. of his Works, in Russian; Moscow, 10th edition). But in trying to create the types of the Decembrists he must have been taken back in his thoughts to the great war of 1812. He had heard so much about it in the family traditions of the Tolstóys and Volkhónskys, and that war had so much in common with the Crimean war through which he himself had lived that he came to write this great epopee, War and Peace, which has no parallel in any literature.

A whole epoch, from 1805 to 1812, is reconstituted in these volumes, and its meaning appears—not from the conventional historian’s point of view, but as it was understood then by those who lived and acted in those years. All the Society of those times passes before the reader, from its highest spheres, with their heart-rending levity, conventional ways of thinking, and superficiality, down to the simplest soldier in the army, who bore the hardships of that terrible conflict as a sort of ordeal that was sent by a supreme power upon the Russians, and who forgot himself and his own sufferings in the life and sufferings of the nation. A fashionable drawing-room at St. Petersburg, the salon of a person who is admitted into the intimacy of the dowager-empress; the quarters of the Russian diplomatists in Austria and the Austrian Court; the thoughtless life of the Róstoff family at Moscow and on their estate; the austere house of the old general, Prince Bolkónskiy; then the camp life of the Russian General Staff and of Napoléon on the one hand, and on the other, the inner life of a simple regiment of the hussars or of a field-battery; then such world-battles as Schöngraben, the disaster of Austerlitz, Smolénsk, and Borodinó; the abandonment and the burning of Moscow; the life of those Russian prisoners who had been arrested pell-mell during the conflagration and were executed in batches; and finally the horrors of the retreat of Napoléon from Moscow, and the guerilla warfare—all this immense variety of scenes, events, and small episodes, interwoven with romance of the deepest interest, is unrolled before us as we read the pages of this epopee of Russia’s great conflict with Western Europe.

We make acquaintance with more than a hundred different persons, and each of them is so well depicted, each has his or her own human physiognomy so well determined, that each one appears with his or her own individuality, distinct amongst the scores of actors in the same great drama. It is not so easy to forget even the least important of these figures, be it one of the ministers of Alexander I. or any one of the ordinances of the calvary officers. Nay, every anonymous soldier of various rank—the infantryman, the hussar, or the artilleryman—has his own physiognomy; even the different chargers of Róstoff, or of Denísoff, stand out with individual features. When you think of the variety of human characters which pass under your eyes on these pages, you have the real sensation of a vast crowd—of historical events that you seem to have lived through—of a whole nation roused by a calamity; while the impression you retain of human beings whom you have loved in War and Peace, or for whom you have suffered when misfortune befell them, or when they themselves have wronged others (as for instance, the old countess Róstoff and Sónitchka)—the impression left by these persons, when they emerge in your memory from the crowd, gives to that crowd the same illusion of reality which little details give to the personality of a hero.

The great difficulty in an historical novel lies not so much in the representation of secondary figures as in painting the great historical personalities—the chief actors of the historical drama—so as to make of them real, living beings. But this is exactly where Tolstóy has succeeded most wonderfully. His Bagratión, his Alexander I., his Napoléon, and his Kutúzoff are living men, so realistically represented that one sees them and is tempted to seize the brush and paint them, or to imitate their movements and ways of talking.

The “philosophy of war” which Tolstóy had developed in War and Peace has provoked, as is well known, passionate discussion and bitter criticism; and yet its correctness cannot but be recognised. In fact, it is recognised by such as know war from within, or have witnessed human mass-actions. Of course, those who know war from newspaper reports, especially such officers as, after having recited many times over an “improved” report of a battle as they would have liked it to be, giving themselves a leading rôle—such men will not agree with Tolstóy’s ways of dealing with “heroes”; but it is sufficient to read, for instance, what Moltke and Bismarck wrote in their private letters about the war of 1870-71, or the plain, honest descriptions of some historical event with which we occasionally meet, to understand Tolstóy’s views of war and his conceptions of the extremely limited part played by “heroes” in historical events. Tolstóy did not invent the artillery officer Timókhin who had been forgotten by his superiors in the centre of the Schöngraben position, and who, continuing all day long to use his four guns with initiative and discernment, prevented the battle from ending in disaster for the Russian rearguard: he knew only too well of such Timókhins in Sebastopol. They compose the real vital force of every army in the world; and the success of an army depends infinitely more upon its number of Timókhins than upon the genius of its high commanders. This is where Tolstóy and Moltke are of one mind, and where they entirely disagree with the “war-correspondent” and with the General Staff historians.

In the hands of a writer possessed of less genius than Tolstóy, such a thesis might have failed to appear convincing; but in War and Peace it appears almost with the force of self-evidence. Tolstóy’s Kutúzoff is—as he was in reality—quite an ordinary man; but he was a great man for the precise reason, that, forseeing the unavoidable and almost fatal drift of events, instead of pretending that he directed them, he simply did his best to utilise the vital forces of his army in order to avoid still greater disasters.

It hardly need be said that War and Peace is a powerful indictment against war. The effect which the great writer has exercised in this direction upon his generation can be actually seen in Russia. It was already apparent during the great Turkish war of 1877-78, when it was absolutely impossible to find in Russia a correspondent who would have described how “we have peppered the enemy with grape-shot,” or how “we shot them down like nine-pins.” If a man could have been found to use in his letters such survivals of savagery, no paper would have dared to print them. The general character of the Russian war-correspondent had grown totally different; and during the same war there came to the front such a novelist as Gárshin and such a painter as Vereschágin, with whom to combat war became a life work.

Everyone who has read War and Peace remembers, of course, the hard experiences of Pierre, and his friendship with the soldier Karatáeff. One feels that Tolstóy is full of admiration for the quiet philosophy of this man of the people,—a typical representative of the ordinary, common-sense Russian peasant. Some literary critics concluded that Tolstóy was preaching in Karatáeff a sort of Oriental fatalism. In the present writer’s opinion there is nothing of the sort. Karatáeff, who is a consistent pantheist, simply knows that there are natural calamities, which it is impossible to resist; and he knows that the miseries which befall him—his personal sufferings, and eventually the shooting of a number of prisoners among whom to-morrow he may or may not be included—are the unavoidable consequences of a much greater event: the armed conflict between nations, which, once it has begun, must unroll itself with all its revolting but absolutely ungovernable consequences. Karatáeff acts as one of those cows on the slope of an Alpine mountain, mentioned by the philosopher Guyau, which, when it feels that it begins to slip down a steep mountain slope, makes at first desperate efforts to hold its ground, but when it sees that no effort can arrest its fatal gliding, lets itself quietly be dragged down into the abyss. Karatáeff accepts the inevitable; but he is not a fatalist. If he had felt that his efforts could prevent war, he would have exerted them. In fact, towards the end of the work, when Pierre tells his wife Natásha that he is going to join the Decembrists (it is told in veiled words, on account of censorship, but a Russian reader understands nevertheless), and she asks him: “Would Platón Karatáeff approve of it?” Pierre, after a moment’s reflection, answers decidedly, “Yes, he would.”

I don’t know what a Frenchman, an Englishman, or a German feels when he reads War and Peace—I have heard educated Englishmen telling me that they found it dull—but I know that for educated Russians the reading of nearly every scene in War and Peace is a source of indescribable æsthetic pleasure. Having, like so many Russians, read the work many times, I could not, if I were asked, name the scenes which delight me most: the romances among the children, the mass-effects in the war scenes, the regimental life, the inimitable scenes from the life of the Court, aristocracy, the tiny details concerning Napoléon or Kutúzoff, or the life of the Róstoffs—the dinner, the hunt, the departure from Moscow, and so on.